About Me

Hi! I’m William “Lee” Dubois (called either Wil or Lee, depending what part of the internet you’re on). I’m a diabetes columnist and the author of four books about diabetes that have collectively won 16 national and international book awards. (Hey, if you can’t brag about yourself on your own blog, where can you??) I have the great good fortune to pen the edgy Dear Abby-style advice column every Saturday at Diabetes Mine; write the Diabetes Simplified column for dLife; and am one of the ShareCare diabetes experts. My work also appears in Diabetic Living and Diabetes Self-Management magazines. In addition to writing, I’ve spent the last half-dozen years running the diabetes education program for a rural non-profit clinic in the mountains of New Mexico. Don’t worry, I’ll get some rest after the cure. LifeAfterDx is my personal home base, where I get to say what and how I feel about diabetes and… you know… life, free from the red pens of editors (all of whom I adore, of course!).

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Wednesday, January 11, 2006

On being a cheap SOB

I'm hobbling around like a cripple this morning, barley able to walk. I've got no one to blame but myself for my predicament. I've often commented, sometimes rudely, that diabetics are the cheapest SOBs in the universe. I have no doubt at all that right this very second, out there somewhere, is a guy who is pulling apart his test strips and trying to clean them out for reuse.

But I've always thought that I was IMMUNE to diabetic cheapness. Wrong.

When I put my last leg set in it hurt. Hurt a lot. Hurt bad. Hurt so you forget to breathe for a minute. Sharp, like a bee sting. But then the right brain kicks in. That's a $40 sensor. Be a man. So I left it in. Wrong call. It hurt some off and on. Never quite enough to signal a definite problem; but always enough to signal that things weren't quite right too. I rode it out for a couple of days. This morning the pain was dull, throbbing "pay attention to me" level. Finally common sense ruled the day. I pulled the set early.

The sensor was bent at a crazy angle. Looks like I hit something inside the leg. Muscle maybe? Then, with all the assorted bandages and tapes off I could see clearly that the leg was very swollen. It is an area about the diameter of a tennis ball. Raised almost an inch above the normal level of the skin. At first it hurt more with the sensor out than in, but now it's getting better.

Printcrafter's tip of the day: don't be a cheap SOB. If it hurts like hell when you put it in, take the sucker out. Screw the $40. You'll be able to walk without limping.

Ugh. Do $40 sensors hurt 3x worse then $12 sets? if its infected- you should get antibiotics pronto..Erica- back in the old days, they'd cut urine test strips in 1/2,1/3's, 1/4's... So I've heard. ( twas wayyyy before my time)

My "friends" at Blue Cross sent me my my annaul Happy New Year and We Are Raising Your Rates Again letter. An extra $80 per month between my wife and I.

Julia--as it turned out, just reallyreallyrally irritated. It has now settled down to the size of a marble and only hurts if I press on it. I expect it to go away in a couple more days.

My pre-Guardian script was for 450 test strips per month.

Type1emt--Rumor has it Medtronic is working on some sort of system for replacing ones that only work a short time. Details sketchy at this point, but by the time of full roll out it looks like there will be some sort of policy in place.